Mark Toland, the former CEO of Corindus Vascular Robotics, believes the next big opportunity for surgical robotics is actually very small.
Toland, who sold the telesurgery robotics company to Siemens in 2019 for $1.1 billion, is now the CEO of Medical Microinstruments S.p.A. (MMI), an Italian company that has developed a surgical robotic system capable of performing microsurgery on capillaries, small vessels and other parts of the body existing robots – and maybe even surgeons – can’t reach.
“You see robotics companies that are trying to be the next Intuitive surgical or go after the laparoscopic surgery play,” Toland says. The objective “of this company is, `I want to create a field that doesn’t even exist today.’”
Founded in 2015 near Pisa, MMI in 2019 secured a CE-Mark for its Symani Surgical System to be used in open microsurgical procedures. The system already has been used in four surgical procedures in Florence, Italy including t…